


Bicentennial

by anonymous_sibyl



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Community: femgenficathon, Female Protagonist, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-29
Updated: 2008-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:30:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Betty Draper and the notable women of 1976.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bicentennial

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/) and [](http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/profile)[**romanticalgirl**](http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/) for looking this over. Any mistakes are mine.
> 
> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works. 

"Franz Klammer was the real story. 1:45.73 in the downhill."

"Seventy-three," their guest intoned.

"Seventy-three. But for Bets here," Don chuckled, "It was all about Dorothy Hamill. She likes her hair."

She nervously brushed her hand over her hair. The wedge cut was new and felt odd underneath her fingers, stiff and sharp from hairspray around the nape of her neck. "She's lovely," she murmured.

"And so are you," he said, leaning in to press a kiss on her forehead before turning back to their guests. "I'm afraid in the summer she'll be wearing pigtails like that Romanian gymnast."

"Nadia Comaneci," she said. She kept quiet during most of Don's work events, but knowing the girls who spun around bars and jumped off beams during an Olympic year was a ladylike hobby so she spoke. "But I think Olga Korbut will give her a good challenge. She's quite talented, don't you think?"

"She's no Franz Klammer."

She let the laughter flow by her. Happy guests are the sign of a successful cocktail party, she reminded herself, plastering a smile on her face and gently touching her fingers to the fondue pot to test for heat.

When she was a girl, one of the younger neighborhood mothers tried to teach her and the other girls how to skate. They wobbled around the pond, rosy-cheeked and laughing in great, white puffs, the moist, cold air freezing in crystals on their scarves. Betty's fingers would be so cold when she got home that she'd squeeze them tight to the cup of hot cocoa her mother had waiting on the table for her.

The heat would flow into her fingers, searing her chilled skin then seeping into her flesh. She'd lift the mug to her lips and blow across the marshmallows heaped on the surface until they parted and warm steam rose off the cocoa and heated her nose. She'd sip the hot liquid then, and shiver with delight as it ran down her throat and settled cozily in her stomach.

Watching Dorothy Hamill perform brought that feeling back to her. Dorothy would spin and spin, and Betty would feel warm inside, as safe and snug as when she'd sat at her mother's kitchen table, sunlight glinting off the blades of the skates she'd left near the door.

Betty hadn't taught Sally to skate, she hadn't the talent for it. Instead, she'd driven Sally an hour to a rink where Sally met with a former bronze medalist who believed in heavy training and frowned on laughter. By the time she got Sally home it was near dinner and too late for cocoa and cookies. Sally quit after three months. She'd never learned to spin. Betty can't remember how.

  
She thought a lot about Patty Hearst. The Hearst family had far more wealth, but Betty wasn't blind to the privileged lives she and Hearst shared. The kidnapping two years before made she and Don overprotective of the children: Sally was away at college, but Bobby was home, young enough for them to try to control but old enough to chafe under their rules. When Hearst proclaimed she was joining the Symbionese Liberation Army, Don condemned her but Betty thought about what it must be like to become someone else. Someone strong.

"What about that Patty Hearst? Do you believe her stories?"

Betty kept her eyes on her avocado-colored coffee cup while her neighbor talked.

"I mean, it isn't exactly womanly, is it?" Melanie helped herself to another slice of Betty's pineapple upside down cake and bit into it while speaking, spraying crumbs over the table. "It's that whole equal rights thing, I think. _Ratifying_ women's roles. It's just silly." She took a cigarette from the pack in her purse. "Mind? I know who I am."

"I'm trying to quit."

"Really?" Melanie exhaled, tapped ash into her dirty dessert plate. "Kids nagging at you?"

"No." Truth be told, Sally had, but that hadn't mattered to Betty. She'd been thinking about quitting for years, ever since the day Don came home complaining that Congress had banned radio and TV advertising for cigarettes. "I think equal rights are a good thing."

Melanie blinked at her in shock. "But surely you don't think it's necessary?"

"I don't know." Betty took a sip of her coffee then set the cup back down on the table. She couldn't take her eyes off the ashes resting atop the bright flower on Melanie's plate. There was something horrible about it, as if the orderly cheeriness of her kitchen and her life had been violated. "Perhaps."

Did Patty Hearst grow up with a bright, sunny kitchen? Did she remember that kitchen when she was locked in a closet and hurt until she grew to sympathize with her captors? Stockholm Syndrome, they called it. It seemed terribly sad, but Betty thought she could understand it. When a thing fills your entire life there's no room for anything else, not even your own thoughts.

Maybe that's why she wanted so much for someone, somewhere, to make a rule that said she was just the same as everyone else. It was as if she could hold it out in front of her as she walked through life and it would protect her. She suspected, however, that she most needed protection from herself.

She began clearing the table when she realized she was imagining herself holding a gun.

  
"Her parents must be devastated."

Don looked at her over the Times. "Whose?"

"Karen Anne Quinlan's."

"Oh. Yes." The paper rattled as he disappeared behind it. "If it were Sally or Bobby in that coma…"

"Mmm." Don was gone already, back to reading the news or, more likely, looking at competitors' advertising. She was alone, even though he was within arms' reach, legs tangling with hers under the breakfast table. She curled her feet under her chair, tucking them out of the way.

Believing she was beyond hope, Karen Anne's family had fought to remove her from her respirator so that she could die. They'd done it out of love. Betty wasn't sure she possessed that kind of love, or that she'd ever experienced it. But Karen Anne hadn't died. Despite the odds her body kept working even though her spirit was long gone.

That was familiar. Her life was a routine, if a somewhat pleasant one, and she did it without conscious thought or desire. If she were given a chance to be free, what would she do? Would she take it or would she cling to the only thing she knew?

"Bets? Have you planned what we're bringing to the picnic?"

"Oh. Yes." She brought her attention back to the breakfast nook with its small, round table and yellow curtains. "An ambrosia salad. With all the colored marshmallows. Everyone loves those."

"Good. Good." He nodded. "What time is it?"

"The parade is at nine, the picnic at eleven-thirty." She took the breakfast dishes to the sink and looked out over their backyard as she washed them. "You'll be there, won't you? We're holding flags."

"Celebrating independence with the neighborhood? I'm looking forward it."

So was she.


End file.
